Mechanical 'Exoskeletons' Nearing Mainstream Adoption

Humans have dreamed of exoskeletons capable of augmenting the limits of human physiology for generations, with perhaps the most iconic representation of this from popular culture being the Power Loader suit worn by Ripley in Aliens, or the military exoskeletons from the video game series Mechwarrior. Of course, not all hypothetical exoskeletons are powered, or augment the entire body, though such are the most popular types in stories.

Despite some prototypes of this technology existing for decades, real world deployment hasn't followed. That is, however, changing. First, in recent years, various technologies that can earn the moniker of Exoskeleton have been successfully tested in medical sciences on patients with disabilities.

That, however, may have been just the tip of the iceberg, as Ford announced earlier this month that they plan to deploy a type of partial Exoskeleton, which is unpowered and helps workers hold heavy weights up over their head for long periods when necessary. It was made by Ekso Bionics, and is to be utilized at 15 locations worldwide following successful U.S. trials. They cost ~$5,000 per unit, which while not cheap, is much cheaper than the average cost to repair the types of injuries it helps prevent.

On the military end of the equation, Lockheed Martin’s lower body-supporting ONYX, another unpowered partial Exoskeleton which helps support the legs of soldiers carrying up to 100 pounds of weight, is set to start U.S. trials this year.

Additionally, powered systems by firms like Panasonic subsidiary Atoun and Sarcos Robotics have begun or will soon begin trials, as well, bringing us closer to the true Power Loader technology. Some of these are being developed for commercial and civilian applications, and others for military uses.

The future may, as many predict, be one of countless human jobs being lost to robotics, but in the near term, robotics will be used to enhance human capabilities, both preserving some jobs for at least the near future in human (or, if you prefer, cyborg) hands, as well as perhaps opening new jobs for humans previously physiologically incapable of performing them, not to mention enabling many disabled individuals to become more active and productive.

#Robotics #MechSuit #Exoskeleton

New Robot Uses Machine Learning To Protect Reefs From Lionfish

Lionfish, once imported to the Atlantic Ocean from the tropics for aquariums, have become an invasive threat to Atlantic coral reef populations. To make matters worse, they're covered in poisonous spines, making them difficult and dangerous for divers to capture or avoid. Hence, it has been difficult to address the threat they pose by attempting to control their spread.

A new type of robot may well be the solution to the problem. Designed by the Worcester Polytechnic Institute, this new type of tiny submersible robot is designed to use Computer Vision, based on Machine Learning of thousands of photos, to identify Lionfish. It can then spear them with one of eight tiny spears, each of which is buoyant, thereby raising the speared fish to the surface.

The robot operates autonomously and untethered, thereby not only being able to operate independently, but also act as a guardian for any human divers present. It is not yet ready for Prime Time, as it still needs to be programmed with a navigation system to enable it to create 3D search grids of its surroundings, but if successful, this new system may both protect human divers, and the invaluable coral reef systems our oceans depend upon, at the same time.

#AI #ArtificialIntelligence #MachineLearning

What A 1998 Article About Technology Means in 2018

20-years ago, author and cultural critic Neil Postman gave a talked titled "“Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change". The author, who has since passed away, posited five big ideas about technological change, which stand up perhaps even better today, with the cultural discussions around Social Media, Fake News, Free Speech, Deplatforming (and whether it's a form of real or quasi censorship), Open Access (especially in the Sciences), and other matters related to or at least involving the Internet and the various online service and platform owners.

These ideas were: 1) “All technological change is a trade-off.” 2) “The advantages and disadvantages of a new technology are never distributed evenly.” 3) "Embedded in every technology there is a powerful idea, sometimes two or three powerful ideas. These ideas are often hidden from our view because they are of a somewhat abstract nature." 4) “Technological change is not additive; it is ecological.” 5) “When a technology becomes mythic, it is always dangerous because it is then accepted as it is, and is therefore not easily susceptible to modification or control.”

We have seen all of these ideas fulfilled, on the sort of scale that is also what makes the Internet so great in other ways, in the decades since Postman first presented them, as the article linked below describes, along with relevant examples like Smartphones, Facebook, and Uber.

You can also read the original talk in pdf format at the following link: http://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/classes/188/materials/postman.pdf

The answer to the titular question is, of course, one which remains to be answered, but it can only benefit us to give serious consideration to the implication of these ideas, and how we might address their negative aspects.

#SocialMedia #FakeNews #Disruption

"Time-Folded Optics" Trades Distance for Time in Ultrafast Photography

Ultrafast photography involves the use of ultrafast camera sensors to capture ultrashort pulses of light. This has allowed for things like capturing billions-to-trillions of Frames Per Second images, scanning through closed books, generating depth maps of 3D scenes, and other applications.

The difficulty of such systems is that, in order to function properly, they are subject to significant design constraints, one of which is that its lens must sit at a distance from an imagining sensor equal to or greater than its focal length to capture images, meaning they require very long lenses.

Now, however, MIT Media Lab Researchers appear to have found a way around this, by swapping out distance for time. They were able to modify a type of ultrafast sensor called a streak camera, so that the light entering the lens system is bounced off a series of small mirrors, at each of which an image is captured, with each image corresponding to a particular length of time and, by correlation, distance from the camera.

Each round trip the light pulse makes through the lens system moves the image focal point closer to the lens, thus allowing for a much more compressed lens system than would be possible through conventional optical techniques. This is especially useful for applications of ultrafast photography over great distances, such as for imaging space, or imaging the ground from space.

#Optics #Photography #StreakCamera

I Know We Just Met, and This is Crazy, But If You're Enjoying My Collection, Then Follow Me Maybe?

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If you're Following this Technology Collection (but NOT Following my Profile yet), and are enjoying my Posts, but have been wanting more, you're in luck! Because, as it so happens, I Post on a variety of topics.

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Adobe Researchers Use Eye Tracking To Create 'Infinite' VR Spaces

One of the biggest challenges of Virtual Reality, is mapping the experience of exploring the simulated world the user is experiencing, onto the real world in which their body is moving around.  While one can incorporate a real world obstacle into the simulation, this is difficult to do without disrupting the immersive quality of the experience.  Furthermore, some obstacles don't lend themselves very well to this, such as the walls of the room the user is in at that moment.  How does one map a large virtual space, onto a small real space, without the user noticing?

Researchers from Adobe believe they have solved this issue now, with a new type of VR System that combined environmental awareness, such as awareness of where physical obstacles are located in the room, with subtle adjustments to the visual perspective synchronized with quick, unconscious eye movements.  The result is an artificial environment which adaptively navigates the users in such a way that not only do they avoid walking into obstacles within a room, but even the limits of the room itself go unnoticed, such that one may explore a vast virtual city from the confines of a typical office or even apartment room.

Fans of the Star Trek franchise will recognize this as roughly equivalent to how the Federation Holodecks allow users to feel like they are in a vast open space, from within the confines of what is, in fact, a fairly small cubical room.

The Researchers claim that most users cannot tell a superficial difference between this adjusted simulated space, and a more conventional unadjusted virtual space (i.e. they don't experience the adjusted space as 'less real' or less immersive than the adjusted one), and that it does not create nausea or other issues typical of VR usage.

#VR #VirtualReality #EyeTracking

How Curiosity (Sometimes) Killed The A.I.

The appeal of Artificial Intelligence is its ability to learn. Feed it a data set for which there are (known or unknown) solutions, and watch it learn! A lot of this, however, depends on humans feeding the AI the right data sources, such as translations of the same documents in different languages.

What if A.I. could want to learn on its own, though? What if it could be given that most human (and, allegedly, feline) trait called curiosity?

New research by non-profit lab OpenAI set out to answer this question. In order to simulate curiosity, they encoded a reward system into the Machine Learning Algorithms to reward the A.I. for encountering new stimuli. More specifically, the A.I. would attempt to guess what the next frame of a video game or television program would look like, and be rewarded for how wrong it was (under the reasonable assumption that a very wrong guess means it has encountered something new, something it did not see before that moment, such as a new level of a game, or new channel on television).

Driven by this, the A.I. played over 50 video games and watched a lot of television (controlled by means of a virtual remote control). It even managed to beat some of these games.

On the downside, the A.I. also sometimes deliberately died in a game, in order to see an end game screen it had not seen before, and became the worst sort of Couch Potato for television, flipping endlessly through channel lineups just to keep seeing new things. In short, it developed something roughly akin to FOMO, the Fear of Missing Out, in this case missing out on new stimuli.

Clearly, then, pure curiosity will likely not be an ideal approach for Machine Learning. However, combined with more classical learning approaches, this may give A.I.'s a taste of one of the very things that makes our own learning process unique: to feel rewarded for the mere act of learning new things and experiencing new things in and of itself.

#AI #ArtificialIntelligence #MachineLearning

Art-Inspired AI Face Blurring May Humanize Anonymity

The ability to blur facial identities on video is invaluable for preserving the anonymity of individuals such as whistleblowers, and is arguably essential to a modern Free Press.  The downside of face blurring, unfortunately, is that it robs the speaker of many visible cues of their humanity, which may influence how viewers perceive them negatively, or at the very least decrease the impact of their statements.

A new art-inspired, A.I.-powered method of facial blurring may go some way towards fixing this issue.  The system first identifies major facial features, such as lips and foreheads, allowing for manual adjustment of these features to obscure the identity.  This alone may make the person unrecognizable, but the next steps are where the magic takes place:

Once manual adjustments are made, the A.I. divides the face into geometric planes, called the Picasso or Cubist Approach after the art form that inspired it.  In the final step it adds inky brush lines and strokes, called the Impressionistic or Van Gogh Approach.  This is then applied to every frame of video.

The end result is a form of face blurring that preserves more humanity, as well as being more aesthetically pleasing due to its artistic roots.

This technology may have other applications, as well.  For example, it could be utilized to create anonymized but still humanized videos for Dating Websites, helping users to potentially attract mates who are not solely interested in their looks to the exclusion of their personality, but who would not benefit from traditional scrambled videos (since, after all, physical attraction cannot be rendered totally irrelevant to dating, either).

#AI #ArtificialIntelligence #MachineLearning

Real Mortgage Company Issues Report on Video Game Housing Market

Mortgage company London & Country has issued an interesting report called “An In-Depth Analysis of the Video Game Housing Market”. It is exactly what its title suggests, specifically looking at the costs (converted from imaginary game money to real currency) of various housing and property options in popular games like Elder Scrolls: Skyrim, Fallout 4, and The Witcher 3.

By way of explaining the interest a real mortgage company might have in writing about such a strange topic, especially as the currencies in many of these games have no real world conversion value, the report begins by noting that, "Every month, more people Google ‘how to buy a house in Skyrim’ than ‘How to buy a house in London,’ ‘the UK,’ ‘France,’ ‘Spain,’ and even ‘America.‘”

This may seem like a meaningless exercise, perhaps a bit of fun to generate media interest and web traffic for London & Country itself. And that may be partly true, at least. However, given the increasingly sophisticated nature of video game real estate, in some cases with real world monetary value, it is if anything predictable that this will become a matter of interest for experts in physical world real estate, as well. Especially if Virtual Worlds should ever become, as many predict they will, a part of the online mainstream in the future, beyond video games and niche platforms like Second Life.

The report actually does make for a handy guide for the Aspiring In Game Homeowner wishing to better understand the various costs and amenities of the various properties before shelling out any precious coinage, as well, thus fulfilling its apparent purpose.

#Gaming #VirtualWorlds #Skyrim